Data Analyst (World Food Programme)

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE OF THE ASSIGNMENT:

WFP country offices deliver assistance to beneficiaries through a variety of digital platforms and service providers. In 2017, WFP worked in partnership with more than 70 commercial Financial Service Providers (FSPs) including banks, micro-finance institutions, mobile money operators and money transfer agents, in addition to using WFP’s own delivery platform, SCOPE. One of WFP’s corporate objectives is to increasingly deliver assistance, either cash-based transfer (CBT) or in-kind, through digital means, and register beneficiaries digitally, in order to achieve greater efficiencies and provide greater accountability and traceability of assistance delivered. Therefore, WFP seeks to build its corporate capacity to centrally receive, store, process and analyse digital operational data for the purpose of promoting accountability, controls and efficiencies as part of cash-based transfer. There is also the opportunity to better inform WFP’s programme design through the analysis of digital data emanating from operations.

Several challenges exist in streamlining digital analysis globally, including the tasks of receiving and maintaining massive amounts of varied and unstructured operational data, processing and generating meaningful analysis of data, while ensuring that data privacy and security standards are upheld. WFP’s Technology Division in HQ is establishing a digital core of technical infrastructure, including a “Data Lake” where it is intended that data from WFP’s corporate systems (WINGS, COMET and SCOPE) will be stored and made accessible for analysis along with other operational data from FSPs, MMOs, CFM and retailers among others. The Data Lake provides an opportunity to develop centralised data analytics by hosting the relevant data in one accessible location.

To achieve the objectives outlined above, WFP is recruiting a Data Analyst to be part of a central analytics team based in its Rome Headquarters, in the CBT Unit in the Office of the Chief of Staff, to provide support to WFP’s CBT operations globally.

ACCOUNTABILITIES/RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Work with the CBT team to understand and implement business requirements.
• Perform data cleaning, organization and analysis and set up regular reporting (dashboards).
• Perform transfer reconciliation tasks (beneficiaries, payments, payment instrument management).
• Detect operational anomalies to trigger further review or fraud investigations.
• Perform trend analysis to promote assurances and programme effectiveness.
• Work with medium/large Country Offices to train/recruit local data analysts to perform selected analysis tasks in-country.
• Perform data visualization, making available the key outputs of data analysis and sectorial assessments to WFP decision-makers.
• Ensure audit trail and governance for analytical codes, rules and outputs.

QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE REQUIRED:

Education: A bachelor's/master's in Statistics, Computer Science or Economics. 

Skills & Knowledge: 

• Experience working with large data sets and summarizing data for business.
• Familiarity with data warehousing and business intelligence concepts.
• Data storing and retrieving skills.
• Experience using visualization tools (Tableau, Qlikview, etc) and setting up dashboards.
• Ability to capture requirements and translate into insights.
• Mature judgement. Experience in working in a multicultural environment.
• Familiar with various ETL tools is desirable.
• Advanced SQL skills. Knowledge/Familiarity with Python or R and/or a willingness to learn them is desirable.

Languages: English (fluent). Any other UN languages, a plus.